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David Cao

David is a Cloud & DevOps Enthusiast. He has years of experience as a Linux engineer. He had working experience in AMD, EMC. He likes Linux, Python, bash, and more. He is a technical blogger and a Software Engineer. He enjoys sharing his learning and contributing to open-source.

ICMP Type 13 and Type 14 — Timestamp Request / Reply

These are two of the original ICMP message types defined in RFC 792 (1981), alongside echo (ping) and destination-unreachable. They were designed for clock synchronization across a network, back before NTP existed. What they do The reply carries three 32-bit…

Fixing CVE-1999-0524 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

CVE-1999-0524 is an information-disclosure finding: the host responds to ICMP timestamp requests (type 13) with timestamp replies (type 14), which can leak the system clock and (historically) help an attacker with time-based attacks. The fix is simply to drop both…

How to Split a Large PDF Into Smaller Files

Large PDFs are everywhere — scanned contracts, exported reports, e-books, bank statements — and they’re almost always inconvenient. They’re slow to open, hard to email, and painful to navigate when you only need pages 47–52. Splitting a PDF into smaller…

pg_top: A Real-Time Monitoring Tool for PostgreSQL

pg_top is a real-time monitoring utility for PostgreSQL, similar to the Linux top command. It allows DBAs and database engineers to monitor PostgreSQL backend processes, active SQL statements, resource consumption, and database activity in real time. Installing pg_top RHEL /…

How To Change Hostname in Ubuntu

Setting a unique and descriptive identity for your server is one of the first steps in effective system administration. Without a correctly configured hostname, automated scripts and monitoring tools may fail to identify your machine, leading to confusion in logs…

Understanding the Linux Sticky Bit Permission

In a standard Linux environment, directory permissions can sometimes be counterintuitive. By default, any user with write access to a directory has the power to delete or rename any file within that directory, regardless of who owns the file or…